The Night Watch
by qaftsiel
Summary: It's 3984 CE and Dean is the Night Watch engineer aboard an RK-NGL high-γ cruiser. It's a run-of-the-mill transit until it isn't.
1. Chapter 1

Howdy, y'all.

Lots of irons in lots of fires, and most of them are grown-up stuff I'd love nothing more than to ignore entirely. To Forget the Sky has been wholly uncooperative, work's been relentless, and I've been pining after going back to school for astrophysics something fierce as of late, so I've been taking out my writing and physics itches on this guy whenever I can steal the time to write.

I have a lot of feelings about spacecraft. A lot.

Still, I hope you enjoy- this one's fully plotted out, mostly written, and will be eight chapters in all, plus a ninth chapter with timelines, worldbuilding notes, and other bits. I'll be posting a chapter each Monday. :)

* * *

"Went out on the mass drivers today, Sammy," Dean says as he shucks the skintight underlayer of the exosuit. The magnetized gauntlets, kneepads, and boots of the external components are already neatly tucked away in their cubby by the airlock. "Another eighteen months, another three point five tee. She's holdin' up like a champ, though- these new-fangled cruisers are somethin' else."

Sammy, his clunky second-generation berth not so much 'nestled' as 'crammed' in between the RK-NGL's cutting-edge, almost miniature creches, doesn't reply. The berth's LS unit emits the same, soft, green _blink_ it has every minute of every year that's passed.

"Knew you'd agree, bud," Dean hums. Always the nerdy one of the two of them, his Sammy- if it isn't planetary law, it's starliners or Pre-Diaspora history or biology or whatever other topic that's caught his attention and imagination. Dean's always hard-pressed to keep up so Sammy won't ever be bored or without someone to talk to. "You're gonna flip when you hear about these new ablation shields. Slicker than fuckin' BAM, man, and just as hard- you'll say she looks like crap, but she's a damn tank, Sammy. Shit's unbelievable."

 _Blink._

"Naw, you just wait," Dean says, finally extricating himself from the last of the underlayer. "I'll tell you all about it, dude. Give you the grand tour and everything, I promise." He lays a gentle hand over the thick, chilly window in the berth's insulated metal shell. "You sleep good, okay? I gotta go check up on the forward arrays, and then it's my turn for a break; I'll get back to you when I start my next shift."

 _Blink_ , goes the LS unit.

Dean takes a moment to gaze down at his brother's quiet face through the berth's porthole, and then makes his way inward through the payload ring.

The RK-NGL, like all high-γ cruisers, doesn't look a damn thing like the ships in Pre-Diaspora movies. As stardrives had been built and then improved upon, humanity had discovered that the not-quite-vacuum of space became _very_ hostile _very_ quickly as one's velocity increased- even the sparsest regions of the interstellar medium would blast away a poorly-designed craft's hull in very little time at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light. Changing course mid-transit, yet another pre-Diaspora science fiction favourite, had led to several well-known explosive disasters due to catastrophic structural failures. Excess mass and pretty-but-useless bulk had rendered the earliest starliners so fuel-hungry and slow that humanity had very nearly abandoned space travel on the basis of cost- when even a team of multinational corporate CEOs couldn't foot the bill for something, it was far, far too expensive.

Eventually, though, humanity had shed its dreams of gleaming, frog-legged saucers, beringed pyramids, and ominous wedges. Leaving the system permanently had become less and less of an option with the way the War Between Worlds had continued to spark bigger and bigger satellite conflicts, and wishful, nostalgic frivolity had quickly been discarded in favour of relentless survivalism.

Within decades, intrasystem cruisers and starliners had dumped mass, shed cubic meterage, and stripped out all unnecessary components. Elegantly curved routes weaving from star to star had been abandoned and redrawn for straight, unwavering lines: Point A to Point B, no frills, no stops. Fins, wings, and rings had been scuttled, thrown to the blast furnaces, and re-forged with only brutal efficiency in mind.

Now, almost fifteen hundred years after the first ship had departed Earth for Proxima A, starliners are starkly different animals when compared to their imagined forbears, and the RK-NGL is no exception. She's a child's stacking toy stretched to almost twenty-five times the diameter of her base- a rigid carbyne-tungsten spine capped at one end by a bouquet of cutting-edge Chevy-AkoSi mass drivers, tipped at the other by the nosecone and ablative shielding, and ringed throughout the rest by reactor, fuel, and payload toroids. From the outside she looks like nothing so much as a half-polished missile from pre-Colonial history, and except for the fact that she's meant to stop and _not_ explode, she might as well be one.

She'd be considered ugly by pre-Diaspora standards, sure, but that's nothing new for starliners, and she's one hell of a lot cooler than some of the other bags of bolts Dean's worked on. Built around tech mecca Orla B, she's hot off the anvil and bristling with technology so advanced that he'd had to study pre-release schematics for _years_ on top of the data dump in order to win his position as the Night Watch crew. He even gets his own space within the Watch toroid- not that it's much, given that the toroid's sandwiched between the payload ring and the nosecone, but it's more than anyone had ever afforded him in the past.

He shares the squished little Watch toroid with two maintenance mechs, GG4-BE and B3N-N1. Dean hates unit numbers for mechs as a matter of principle, so he calls the two Gabe and Benny, respectively; in the year of prepwork before their AIs had gone into hibernation for the transit, they'd been pretty happy about it. They're quiet now, of course, but they still respond to the nicknames as well as their actual designations, and Gabe still plays games with Dean during its downtime to help keep him from getting too bored.

Gabe still kicks his ass at Go every time.

Dean kinda misses the way the mech used to lord it over him.

"Fifteen and a half down, nine and change to go," he assures no one in particular as he lets himself onto the spine goway.

The quickest way to get from point A to point B on the ship, the goway is the cylindrical, two-meter-wide space between the inner surfaces of the toroids and the heavy-duty strutwork of the RK-NGL's spine. Once upon a time, he would have found it scary as fuck- it is a kilometer-long, pitch black tunnel shot through by support braces and anchor points, after all- but after dozens of Watch gigs on similar (if smaller) craft, it's just a larger variation on a familiar theme.

At least, it's familiar on most trips. Something's a little off as Dean makes his way noseward- there's a glow coming from behind the hatch into the nosecone and the forward array banks. It's pretty blue, but the area around it doesn't register as temperature-hot, thank fuck. Still, Dean's whole frame prickles with high alert. There shouldn't be light from that part of the ship. End of.

By the time he's a meter or so from the hatch and its little window, the light is so bright that he can see his own hands and arms as he gently redirects his careful drift up the goway. Their unnatural gleam is even weirder in the eerie, blue glow.

Slowly, cautiously, Dean throws the analog lock on the hatch and swings it open.

Nothing happens.

Floating in front of the open hatch, Dean's skin prickles and buzzes anyway- no matter the number of modifications or years, the old lizard brain's reflexes still resurface from time to time. Scoffing at his animal ridiculousness, he shakes it off and gently propels himself into the array bank.

The glow, he realizes, is nothing more than his handlight- the one he'd been looking for since the last full check-in he'd done of the ship. "God dammit," he grumps aloud, and snatches up the device. He glares at the feathery afterimages of the array bank after switching the handlight off. "Gotta get some fuckin' rest."

Once he's given himself just enough time for a satisfactory sulk, he plugs into the output jack, switches video inputs, and looks over the last month of data from the array. Except for a cluster of blips in the 450 nm range a few days ago, the readouts all look pretty normal- just the usual bunch of Doppler-shifted noise from stars and regular pings from navigation posts along the RK-NGL's route. Even the blips aren't anything huge, really. Dean's seen others like them, especially on that one supremely fucked-up trip from Landung to Dàodá that, among other things, had involved passing through a (distant) pulsar's jet range. _Those_ peaks had been literally off the fuckin chart; these were just… well, blips. Kinda dinky, actually, like they ran over a messy smudge of blue somewhere along the way.

Or maybe crossed the path of some dumb kid's toy laser. Dean's seen that before, too. Either way, it's nothing worth freaking out over. He archives the readouts along with the rest, closes up shop in the fore array, and grabs the Watch toroid's hatch with an easy swing.

Gabe's docked and in full dormancy when Dean drifts in; Benny, on the other hand, is just coming out of standby. [ _Greetings, Dean,]_ they send as they run their startup routines. Dean watches, and wonders if it'll ever not be jarring to see all that servo motion and not hear a bit of it.

 _[Hey, Benny. Good rest?]_

 _[Charge is at 100% and all systems are running within optimal parameters,]_ Benny reports out, which is about as close to a "yeah, man, like a baby" as Dean is going to get in transit. He waits while Benny pulls the archived array readouts and the walkover reports from Dean's shift. Shortly thereafter, an update appears in the RK-NGL's log- Benny's agreed with Dean's reports, and has signed off on handing over the shift without further action needed. [ _The Takaoka-REST has completed startup and is prepared for use.]_

 _[Thanks, dude,]_ Dean replies, and opens the hatch to his pod. [ _See you in eighteen.]_

Like every other mech Dean's been in transit with, Benny doesn't respond to the small talk. Dean'll get a 'thank you' for it at the end, though, and that's enough to keep him doing it throughout the trip.

Pressing his legs together with a soundless click, Dean levers himself feet-first into the open Takaoka-REST pod that's been his home sweet home since leaving Orla. Except for the missing atmo panel, the high-gauge standby lines, and the heavy-duty power line, it's exactly like every other hotel pod Dean's ever been in- a bit over a meter wide, a little under a meter and a half tall, two and a half meters deep, and plushly cushioned on every wall but that of the hatch. It's probably the most unnecessary thing on the whole damn ship, given that Dean could do just as well with a run-of-the-mill standby dock like Benny and Gabe use, but he's not about to argue if his employers want him to have a few creature comforts.

After a few minutes of fiddling with the standby jacks and wrestling with the power line (someday he's gonna get around to reprogramming so he'll have that piece of shit power port somewhere _logical,_ not the _middle of his fucking back_ ), Dean queues his sleep routines and closes his eyes.

When he wakes, they'll be another year and two point three trillion kilometers closer.

It's good progress.

* * *

 _Dean stands and watches as the stasis technicians swarm around Sam's berth; next to him, there is a man with scruffy hair and blue eyes. Dean doesn't remember the man, but he remembers this moment like it happened mere minutes ago, and not… then. He remembers all too well the unresponsive LS unit, with no indications of where the error might be. He remembers the engineers announcing that there was no way to crack the unit open to run diagnostics without a catastrophic stasis failure._

 _He remembers realizing that his baby brother wasn't going to wake up anytime soon._

 _That terrible moment in time, pivotal and agonizing, replays in front of him like a Netflix show._

 _The man tilts his head and watches as the swarming technicians slow, shake their heads, and then steadily disperse. As he had before, Dean falls to his knees._

 _The scene shifts. It's Dean's first Watch gig, aboard an intrasystem shuttle. Sam's berth matches the ones around it pretty closely._

 _The flight engineer's mouth is moving behind his faceplate, but the words come to Dean as if through water. 'You're joking, right? Until you're sucking oxygen like the rest of us, Tin Man, you're just another mech to babysit. Go play with your robot buddies and leave us real people the fuck alone.'_

 _The man is there again. He and Dean watch the flight engineer throw the lock on the mech hangar as he leaves._

 _The scene blips. A vidscreen in a hospital room that resembles a nanofactory more than a medical ward streams ProximaNewsNow on mute; closed captioning flickers across the bottom of the screen. A 2967 Chevy Impala is barely recognizable onscreen, its sturdy carbon fiber frame turned to flinders beneath the shattered bulk of a freight canister. Two nearby lumps are covered with white sheets. The thing the emergency crews extricate from the wreckage doesn't look like a body, and doesn't get much better even after they've dunked it into an emergency stasis creche and sent an ambulance racing away with it._

 _Dean stares up at the screen from the hospital bed. Near the door of the room, a bald man and a bearded, dark-haired man face each other down, red-faced and shouting and pointing fingers. A younger, floppy-haired man- Sammy- sits in a chair beside the bed, hands clapped over his ears and tears filling his eyes. Lying in the bed, Dean closes his eyes and listens to the soft whine of servos as he flexes his new hands- open, closed. Open, closed._

 _Sticking out from the hospital gown, Dean's new legs gleam steely blue under translucent sensory-polymer skin. He watches the fibers twitch as he raises one knee, then the other._

 _More blips, faster this time. Dean re-learning to walk, Dean picking up egg after egg after egg until he's finally able to do it reliably without cracking the shells. Dean re-learning to write. To speak. To sleep._

 _Dean staring down at the rejection from the MIT-Proxima Bouchet School of Physics, where he had been only been months away from his doctorate- 'intellect' is a term valid only for those with organic brains, it seems._

 _Dean going to live with Sammy, who's always there, alway his ally, until the day Dean learns he won't wake up._

 _They're in front of Sammy's creche again._

 _The man's eyes are very, very blue._


	2. Chapter 2

As it has been for the last who knows how many rotations, the Takaoka-REST's soft blue lighting is the first thing that Dean sees when his wakeup routines reach his sensory cortices.

He has a few moments of lead time before he's expected to be out of the pod and attending to his rounds; this time, he spends them appreciating the fact that he's dreamed at all.

Ever since the infusion after the crash had finished its job, dreams have been increasingly rare. Whether it's a factor of age or structure, Dean isn't sure, but when there's no way to reverse anything, he doesn't much care about the whys or wherefores. Instead, he hoards his dreams like gems- lately, it feels like the only trustworthy proof that he's still himself. Still _human,_ somewhere in there.

 _Reminder: shift change in 00:15,_ Gabe pings.

 _Acknowledged,_ Dean replies, and flails around behind himself until he can grab his power line and tug it free of its jack.

Gabe's small, vaguely humanoid body is already linked up to its dock; framed by the huge, arched solar arrays held in abeyance for its orbital activity once they arrive, it looks almost angelic.

Dean knows a hell of a lot better than to fall for the angel trap when Gabe's out of transit. It'd become pretty clear right away that Gabe had booted up with 'little shit' set to max plus one, and its pranks had been infamous throughout the Orla Docks long before Dean had ever arrived. That didn't stop Benny and Dean from referring to Gabe with any and all manner of affectionately insulting, feather-related epithets, of course. The irony had been pretty delicious, especially when rookies had started their first shifts.

Like every other mech, though, Gabe activates a personality shunt at the time of launch, and then it really does resemble the mythical, winged beings of pre-Diaspora religious lore- it's quiet, emotionless, and driven solely by its Watch directives.

Even more reason to give it shit, naturally. _Any trouble, birdbrain?_

In lieu of a response, Gabe uploads its records of its activity for the last six months to the communal chat for Dean's backup analysis.

Right at the top of the list is a passenger and cargo inventory. _Gabe? Isn't Benny supposed to run the inventories?_

 _B3N-N1 encountered an irregularity in mass driver A3 and required substantial shift time to safely and successfully resolve the problem. Cargo inventory was passed to this unit due to the delay and will remain in place for transit duration,_ Gabe replies. _The inventory will be signed and verified when the confirming unit has completed a second, independent cargo inventory._

Dean closes his eyes. He _hates_ inventory. _Is there anything I need to check in particular?_

The communal chat flips to a map of the RK-NGL. A single passenger berth is flagged; the tag next to the flag indicates that the berth, reserved by one Professor James Novak, doesn't appear to contain a passenger.

Dean frowns. _Was he missing on the other inventories?_

Gabe flashes its records of previous inventories- all of them show James Novak's berth as empty.

It had to happen eventually- there are empty berths and passenger weirdnesses on every transit, and this one had seemed a little too peachy to be true. Of course it's a goddamn academic, too; Dean's seen more absentee academics on transits than nearly any other demographic. He doesn't doubt that the poor bastard is probably sitting somewhere on Orla B and staring down at a missed-transit fee. Starlines _don't_ appreciate empty berths. _I don't think it's anything to worry about. Just another missed transit._

 _The inventory will be signed and verified when the confirming unit has completed a second, independent cargo inventory,_ says Gabe.

Dean turns himself using a wall-mounted handle and pushes off for the goway hatch. _Acknowledged,_ he grumbles, and may or may not slam the hatch behind himself.

"It's fucking ridiculous, Sammy," he growls out almost half a shift later, shortly after reconnecting to the ship's intranet and submitting his completed inventory. "I mean, what's the point? It's a _transit_. Either you make it where you're going or you become one with the interstellar medium, and you know who doesn't give a shit about money or dividends or any a' that shit? Fucking dust clouds on transit lanes. That's who."

Sammy's berth blinks serenely.

"No, I won't calm down. Two months and twenty-four days of my shift've been _wasted_ because of two hundred and fifty first-class _asshats,_ and I've still got everything else on my list that needs doing," Dean grumps. He pats Sammy's berth gently, then twists so he's perched against the gangway that runs between the rows of creches. "I mean… I'll get over it, dude, but seriously. You gotta admit it's pretty dumb."

As ever, Sammy's berth blinks.

Reassured by the steady, reliable marker of his brother's long sleep, Dean pushes off from the gangway. "Yeah, yeah. Catch you on the next shift, bitch."

* * *

 _All of the displays are tuned to the same, seemingly unchanging image- an unremarkable reddish star, centered in a field of hundreds of other stars. The only indicator that anything is in fact changing is an HUD showing three sets of numbers, two of which have been falling slowly but steadily over the past two weeks._

 _He staggers out of the warmup lounge, still shaking the dregs of berth-sleep from uncooperative limbs, and almost runs headlong into someone just standing there in the corridor. "Dude. What the hell?"_

 _Dean's first impression is of wide blue eyes. His second is of a gravelly voice rasping out, "Where is this place?"_

 _The man- scruffy dark hair, tan coat, messed up tie- looks about as dazed as Dean feels, and a whole lot more lost. Given where he's standing and that fresh-out-the-berth stare, Dean can only surmise that the poor bastard's an S-RAE and takes pity. "That's a long story, but if you wanna grab a drink, I can try to explain."_

 _The explanation might not stick- Stasis-Related Adverse Events are nasty shit, especially if the loss of memory or cognitive function is too severe- but at the very least, he can give the guy some human companionship._

 _Soon they're at a table overlooking the starboard observation deck. The guy wraps his hands around a steaming mug of coffee and stares at the swirls of cream like they're some kind of science experiment. "And this necessitated a departure?" he rumbles, glancing up from his drink to give Dean a questioning look. "Surely this conflict could not encompass so large a system."_

 _Dean shrugs. "The politics back then had been fucked up for the better part of two centuries by the time war was declared officially- my brother Sammy always said it started way back in the early 21st century, and I trust him to know. Anyway, by the time the Tharsis Atrocity happened, there were partisan settlements from both sides around Neptune, the farthest planet from Sol."_

 _A soft klaxon sounds over the ship's intercom; Dean braces himself and S-RAE Guy as the ship judders through another deceleration adjustment. The moment passes without incident, and soon conversations throughout the deck's numerous restaurants and shops resume._

" _You seem to know a great deal about the matter," S-RAE Guy rumbles. "Answer me this: if the whole system was caught up in this war for hundreds of years, then how was this craft constructed and crewed? Was this 'First Starliner' a partisan vehicle?"_

 _Dean chuckles and shakes his head. "It's all sixth-form history at this point. That and my brother's a huge nerd; I've taken him to more museums and seminars than you can believe." He sips at his own drink. "But nah, no one on the First Starliner was partisan. Thing with arguments is there's always someone stuck in the middle, and The First Starliner was a 'stuck in the middle' thing- it was a nomad project. Settlements belonged to partisans back then, so if you wanted to stay neutral, you went nomadic and lived your whole life on ships and in hidden enclaves. The Sol System is pretty huge, so there was a lot of room for those kindsa groups to roam and hide- I think there were something like two hundred different communities involved on the Starliner alone, and they weren't even a tenth of all the groups actually out there. They all knew how to keep moving and keep quiet and make the most of the shit they had, though, and this was what came of it."_

 _S-RAE Guy turns his gaze to the observation deck displays and seems to think on that for a while. "Does the war continue?"_

" _Lasted about three hundred and fifty years; ended a little over fourteen hundred years ago."_

 _That earns Dean a slow, blue-eyed blink. "That is a great deal of time for humans, and yet you speak as if the event is very recent."_

 _Dean gives a crooked little smile and stares down at his coffee. "For humans, it_ is _a lotta time, but for me? It's… kinda complicated. See, the First Starliner wasn't the first ship to get to Proxima, even though it left almost a hundred and forty years before the War's end. About ten years after the War ended, physicists and engineers with Chevrolet and Ako Si Kalayaan- that's AkoSi for short- made the big breakthrough that enabled high-_ _γ transit. Three starliners with the new Chevy-AkoSi drivers left the Sol System and made it to Proxima in about eighty years- forty-five years_ ahead _of the First Starliner._

" _So the war was over for the people on Proxima, but for everyone on the First Starliner, it was still raw. They'd all seen shit that only a handful on Proxima'd ever had to witness and they'd lived with being hunted because they'd been the only openly neutral people left, so their arrival fundamentally changed the way the War was viewed. A lot of us grew up with First parents, First neighbors, First teachers, and memorials in every city- some folks called Proxima a history world, and they weren't wrong." He laughs, a little sadly. "My Dad was a First. The berths in his block of the ship wouldn't thaw, and it wasn't til like two hundred and sixty years_ after _Arrival that they finally got them warmed up. It… wasn't easy for him, but I think Mom, Sammy, and I made it better in a lot of ways."_

 _Dean can almost hear S-RAE Guy crunching the numbers. "But if that was…"_

" _Yeah," he interjects, not ungently. "Yeah. It's, uh. Been a long time."_

 _They sit in awkward, somber silence for a long time._

 _The ship shudders through another deceleration._

" _So here I am spilling my guts, and I haven't even introduced myself," Dean says, feeling a little bad for making things so weird for some poor sap with a scrambled head. "I'm Dean Winchester. You?"_

 _S-RAE Guy's full lips tip up into a smile. "Castiel."_

" _Cas," Dean says, because what the fuck kind of name is 'Castiel' even? "Good to met you, buddy."_

 _Cas's tilted smile turns into a genuine, fond sort of thing._

" _Hello, Dean."_


	3. Chapter 3

Hey, all. So I'm gonna have to delay posting the chapters after this one- there's been another post-merger shakeup at my company, and my boss just announced that she's leaving in two weeks for another company. That leaves me in a pretty awkward place with the move to a new, solo apartment looming in June, and with my contract slated to end on the 31st, I'm going to have to give a lot more time to make sure senior leadership don't write me off as disposable now that my boss is gone. Apologies in advance. :(

* * *

Dean closes his eyes against the pod's blue lighting and ignores Gabe's ping. He tugs at the standby cable and does his usual wakeup routines, but almost all of his threads of thought are on the dream- dreams _plural_ within a _single-digit_ interval- and what it might mean.

Systems scans and current assays are coming back clean, so it's not something seriously wrong with him, but after so long going almost totally without, it's odd to experience _two_ dreams in so short a time. He wonders what the hell it is that's going on to trigger two of them so close together- the hotel pod? Maybe the friendly relationship he'd established with Benny and Gabe in the year prior to departure?

Some part of him's shouting that it's just proof that he's still real, but he's long since learned to tune out that kind of wishful thinking. He wonders, too, who the guy is that he keeps seeing. He looks a little like one of the doctors he'd caught a glimpse of during his hospital stay after the accident- fuck if Dean could remember any of their names, there were like six dozen specialists working on him at any given time, and a lot of his memories from that first year are kind of fuzzy- but why Dean would be seeing the guy _now_ is beyond him.

Then again, that's sort of what dreams had been like, before: a random jumble of memories, tossed out and turned into a story by the brain. He remembers that much, at least.

Without any solid data indicating anything off, he can only guess that it's something to do with time- maybe he's finally to the point where shit's evolved enough to do things like dream. Maybe he really is human under all the other crap- maybe he's still the same Dean, the same guy like Sammy had always said.

Dean shakes his head. Sammy had also been a bit of a bleeding heart, 'mech's rights' sort of kid.

Whatever the case, he'll take what he can get, even if it means more history talk that just reminds him of Sammy. If he's lucky, his brain will spam a few memories of Sammy in a dream, and he'll get to talk with his baby brother for a while. Something's better than nothing.

The Takaoka-REST opens on its own just as Dean's internal comm system starts jangling with a direct call instead of a ping. He pushes out of the pod and catches the external handle, throwing a glare Gabe's way. [ _What the hell, Gabe? I have ten minutes,]_ he says once he's reconnected to the RK-NGL intranet.

The mech, it seems, is only just situating itself in its standby dock. [ _An early start is required due to repairs in the forward arrays that have yet to be completed.]_

Dean groans. He requests Gabe's shift report, navigates to it when all he gets is a link, and scowls when, sure enough, there's evidence of short-circuits in the array banks he'd just checked two shifts ago. There hadn't been any sign of wear or tear then, but then again, little shit like this pops up all the time during transit. High-γ travel is part and parcel of modern life, sure, but it isn't perfect- Dean would be out a Sammy-supporting job otherwise.

As he scans the rest of the report, he has to do an actual double-take and scroll back to the top of the inventory section just to make sure he isn't seeing things.

He's not.

 _[Gabe?]_

 _[Yes, Dean.]_

 _[Why are there three empty creches in the passenger inventory now?]_

It takes Gabe a little longer than usual to answer, like something about Dean's query has it stumped. [ _Records confirm that Unit Dean Winchester verified and approved the inventory carried out by Unit GG4-BE during the previous rotation, where it was indicated that NOVAK J, GREY A, ROSS A were absent.]_ After a beat, it adds, [ _Recommended action: systems scan.]_

Dean disconnects from the intranet and runs another scan, cursing. Those other two yahoos had _not_ been missing during the last check. If he's caught some weird-ass _thing_ some jackass uploaded to the ship's servers to cover their goons' tracks, he's going to hunt the bastard down and murder them himself- _no one_ fucks with his memory, end of.

The scan comes up clean, thank fuck- he probably dodged some kind of time-calibrated bullet because he's a paranoid bastard and never goes into standby without cutting his intranet connections to everything, ship included. Still, he reconnects to the intranet using his VPN and firewall protocols anyway. Paranoid bastards keep their heads un-fucked-with.

Gabe is satisfied with Dean's scan results, but the mech's dumbed-down transit AI doesn't seem to know what to do with the discrepancy. It takes it nearly ten minutes (practically an eternity) to consult with the RK-NGL's systems and come to an acceptable conclusion. [ _Records stored by Unit B3N-N1 and Unit RK-NGL are consistent with findings by Unit GG4-BE. Disregard the erroneous record.]_

Fat fucking chance Dean's going to disregard two people on his transit just disappearing from the records, but he acknowledges Gabe's directive anyway. No point in arguing with the mech about it.

Swinging himself out of the mech toroid hatch toward the nosecone, he puts this latest weirdness on the proverbial back burner so he can get to the repairs that need doing.

The fix in the forward array is quick enough once he's found the problem cables, but it still takes several hours of partial array shutdowns and status runs to isolate the impacted segment. Then it's more testing on the bad segment, this time to find the offending bundle of wires, and then it's another several hours to worm his way up to the bundle itself. It's right up against the underside of the ablative cone, and his frame _rings_ with cold every time he accidentally bumps into the aluminum plating. He thanks human laziness for the fact that transit security footage is only viewed by robots post-arrival- cold can't kill him, sure, but he still makes a very undignified scramble for distance and comfort all the same.

All told, it's nearly three days after start-up by the time he gets an all-clear readout on every segment in the forward array and can finally slam that hatch shut behind him.

There are definitely times when he seriously considers a personality shunt for transits, just for his own sanity, and this is one of them.

He never goes through with it, but _boy_ does he think about it.

.***.

Inventory, as usual, is about as exciting as watching steel oxidize, at least until he makes it to the first of the three berths Gabe had indicated as empty. Like he had been before, NOVAK, JAMES seems to be missing without any particularly suspicious indicators- caul and seals are intact, biomonitor records show that the creche never registered any cargo mass, and the T-curve is consistent with an empty creche. He double and triple-checks everything, just to be totally sure, but there's really nothing to find, so he shrugs and moves along to the next creche.

Several tiers down and way too much time later, Dean comes to ROSS, AZAZEL. He opens his 'erroneous' inventory record on his own desktop, then opens Gabe's 'correct' inventory in the communal chat.

Seal quality isn't something that can be hacked, contrary to what popular media would have folks believe. The seal indicator, a brittle, high-tension film of material applied to the creche interior and door seam by the creche mechanism itself, shatters completely from even nano-level breaches _anywhere_ in the creche chamber and is impossible to circumvent. The 'tampered creche' trope is an old favourite in crime procedurals, but it's a hell of a lot easier said than done- by now, it's something of a contest between Takaoka and Kryonik's R&D groups to see whose anti-tamper measures troll would-be vandals harder.

Given that tamperers are usually out to kill someone, those R&D teams have a _lot_ of latitude. Maybe even too much, but Dean's not gonna be the idiot who actually _says_ that.

As it stands, ROSS, AZAZEL doesn't seem to have gone anywhere at any point, if he had ever been in the creche- the indicator strip around the creche seam is still glassy and intact under the protective transit caul (also intact). Dean signs off on that item in the inventory, then moves down to the next: mass and temp.

During the last inventory he'd run, the creche had reported a mass of seventy-three kilos, but now it's showing zero all the way back to launch. The same goes for creche temperature- before, the T-curve had been typical for a one point eight meter, seventy-three kilo male with middling to high muscle tone and lower body fat levels, but now it's just another near-textbook cooling curve for a given volume of standard starliner canned air.

When the creche's cargo mass sensors return readings of zero all the way back to launch, Dean shakes his head, shrugs, and signs off on ROSS, AZAZEL as another missed transit. About four weeks later, he does the same for GREY, ALASTAIR after finding the same results.

Whoever the two are, someone's gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like they'd boarded and launched with the RK-NGL.

.***.

"... and so now I've got two empty creches, a good chance that there's some asshat passenger or passengers who are really just here to fuck up or stalk the missing guys and are probably gonna be _real_ pissed when they figure out that their marks weren't even on the ship, _and_ I'm gonna have to stay on VPN the rest of the time in case there's any other intranet fuckery going on. Can you believe this shit?"

Sammy's berth just blips along, as it always has. It's probably better that way; Sam would have cut off Dean's bitching ages ago, and then Dean would have felt bad, and it'd be awkward as shit for like a day until Sammy got fed up with _that,_ too.

Dean sighs and tips himself back against the chilly, un-cauled surface of Sam's berth. "This transit sucks, Sammy. I mean, not as bad as that Landung-to-Dàodá clusterfuck, but it's getting there pretty quickly. Send me some positive lawyer mojo, would you?"

Sammy blips.

It's as much as Dean can hope for, really.

* * *

 _A little kid shrieks with delight as they fly down a slide; grinning, Dean remembers doing the same thing when he'd been about that age. He laughs when the kid's mom catches them as they bolt past and gently reminds them to walk and not scream, please. Dean had been on the receiving end of a lot of those talks, too._

 _Next to him on the bench, S-RAE Guy- Castle? Cassy-elle? Dean just remembers 'Cas'- stares at the playground with a look of squinty-eyed bafflement. He tilts his head. "What purpose does this structure serve?"_

 _Dean blinks. "You don't know what a playground is?" he squawks before he can stop himself._

 _Cas looks over at Dean with big, serious blue eyes. "I… cannot say I have ever seen one before."_

 _Okay. Either Dean's sort-of-adopted the worst functional Stasis-Related Adverse Event on medical record, or Cas has had the shittiest fucking childhood_ ever. _Dean's not a total dick, so he's not gonna demand why the guy's never seen one before, but hell if he's gonna let Cas the S-RAE Guy waltz off into the world without knowing what a playground is. "So little kids like to run and climb and crawl around on shit, right?"_

 _Cas' head tips in the other direction. Dean's weirdly reminded of a bird. "I wouldn't know. Am I correct in assuming that you do not mean 'shit' in the literal sense?"_

 _Point in the 'shittiest childhood' column, there. "Uh, yeah dude, you're correct on that." He gestures toward the little kid, who's clambering around upside down on the monkey bars while the mom hovers anxiously and tries to coax them down. "Kids're still figuring everything out- running, jumping, thinking, all that crap, and it'll still be like ten years before one that age's got anything that looks like common sense, so… they run, and jump, and climb, make up stories and games so they can do more jumping and running and climbing, and let me tell you, it does_ not _matter where they are- kids will do kid shit_ anywhere. _That," he says, jabbing a thumb at the playground structure as a whole, "is a way to trick them into doing their kid shit in one place, where there's nothing to knock over, fall over on top of them, or-"_

 _The kid slips and falls while they're climbing down from the monkey bars. It's an awkward tumble, but the smart-gel surface of the playground absorbs the worst of the fall, and the kid bounces right up again to go haring off somewhere else._

" _A rigid surface would have been quite harmful in that situation," Cas remarks. "I believe I am beginning to understand." The way he's watching makes Dean think he's more focussed on the mom than the kid right now. "What differentiates a 'kid' individual from a non-'kid' individual?"_

 _Dean isn't sure whether he wants to address the question or the weirdly-clinical use of 'non-kid' in a sentence. He's reporting this dude's case to Takaoka first thing in the fucking morning- there's no way the guy won't get some kind of settlement out of it, and he's probably gonna need all the help he can get, the poor fucker. "Uh," he says when he realizes Cas is still waiting for an answer. "Kids aren't adults, like us. They're small, and they still run around and play and ask shit tons of questions and all that."_

 _Cas narrows his eyes. "I don't understand. What stops_ us _from running and playing and asking questions?"_

" _Uh," Dean says, stumped. "Rules? Adults… they've got responsibilities, and jobs, and they've got to take care of their families and their houses and stuff like that. It's real life, I guess. When you're six it's one thing, but if you run around and play tag and stick your nose in everything when you're thirty-six, people're gonna look at you like you're nuts, and then no one'll hire you."_

 _After a moment of consideration, Cas turns his gaze back to the child. "I find that sad. The kid's activities look…" He pauses, as if searching for the right word. "Enjoyable. Do you think they would be?" Blue eyes turn down to broad hands with long fingers; Cas flexes them experimentally and Dean wonders if maybe his cluelessness really is the amnesia, and not a shitty childhood like he'd assumed. The movement's so much like the one Dean had done when his hands were suddenly new again that… yeah, he really can't help but think it's an S-RAE thing. Takaoka's_ so _getting a long, in-depth email about this, because seriously, Cas deserves a goddamn fortune in restitution._

 _In the meantime, Dean needs to remember to answer Cas' question and not just sit there planning lawsuits. "Uh, yeah? It's all pretty cool, I guess. You wanna try the monkey bars?"_

" _The bars from which the kid fell?" Cas asks, and Dean nods. "I- I do not think I wish to experience that immediately. They appear challenging. However, the climbing structure with many bars and handholds, and the… helical inclined trough, and walking through the local flora in search of small, exoskeletal organisms. Those appeal to me greatly."_

 _Dean blinks. "The jungle gym, the slide, and bug hunting?"_

" _Yes," Cas says, very seriously._

 _When Dean looks back at the playground, the kid and their mom have departed- it's just Dean and Cas there, no one else in sight. A glance at Cas shows him staring wide-eyed at the jungle gym, and Dean finally reaches his breaking point._

 _Cas looks a little bewildered when Dean pulls him to his feet and divests him of his beige coat and suit jacket, but when Dean starts tugging him toward the jungle gym, his face lights up with understanding._

 _Pretty soon it's Dean being tugged everywhere. It's worth it, though, because when Cas does finally smile, it's this gloriously crinkle-nosed actual ray of fucking sunshine even from the very peak of an arc on the swing set, and Dean's never seen anything like it in all his life._

.***.

" _Why do adults deny themselves these things, Dean?" Castiel asks later. He's only half-visible over the peachy blooms of some kind of flower; even though the question had been directed at Dean, his gaze is locked on a bee as it bumbles from petal to petal. "These things- joy, discovery, spontaneity- are real, too, are they not?"_

 _Dean doesn't have a good answer. "I… they are, Cas. I guess… we give up a lot as adults. Running around. Playing. Dreams. All that-"_

" _Dreams?" Cas asks. He tilts his head. "I thought dreams were a neural phenomenon during REM sleep."_

 _Dean sighs. Cas doesn't remember playgrounds, but he remembers sciencey shit about dreams? Seriously. Letter. Takaoka. First fucking thing. "Dreams in the metaphorical sense. Things you want to do, to see, to be in the future. I wanted to be a physicist, and I was doing it, but sometimes real life makes it impossible to keep trying to follow a dream, especially when you've got other people depending on you. A kid doesn't have that issue, so a kid runs around and dreams all these crazy dreams and just enjoys the shit out of everything, because they don't know loss, or not-having, or… you get the idea. It's the adults in their life who're supposed to support them so they don't have to know it. The more support you have, the more you can… do all that, I guess."_

 _Castiel leans forward and buries his face in the cluster of flowers. He seems thoughtful as he sits there and breathes. "Even if you give up pursuing the dream, though, it is still there?"_

" _Guess so."_

" _Do adults create new dreams?"_

" _All the fucking time," Dean says, and thinks of Sammy in his berth, and of the thesis that still sits waiting on the same drive it has since he finished it, and of a heartbeat- a real one._

 _Cas looks up at the wobble in Dean's voice. "I am sorry. I have caused you pain."_

 _Shrugging, Dean crams his hands in his pockets. "'S not your fault, man. Human society's shitty- for most folks, living a dream is a luxury. Being an adult human means you learn to aim for what you can and find happiness in the little stuff. Warm weather. Cuddling with someone on a cold night. Pie fresh out of the oven. A good book. Seeing a new place when you get the chance to travel. Doesn't fill the gap, and you'll always have that part of you that'll wish you could, but… it's not all bad, okay? I promise, there's a lot of good stuff for adults out there, too. We don't get to run and play the same way, but we do… we do get to do things kids can't, and a lot of it is awesome."_

 _He's not sure who he's reassuring- Cas, because the poor guy's gonna have to go back out into the real world someday, or himself._

 _Dean nearly jumps out of his skin when a gentle hand tucks something bristly behind his ear. Cas smiles at him from barely a foot away and lowers his hand; a peachy-white blob bobs at the corner of Dean's vision._

" _Maybe that's a part of it," Cas says. "Being an 'adult human', as you put it." The corners of his eyes crinkle with his smile, and even though his blue eyes look sad, they look happy, too. "If things are as you say, then I think… I think perhaps that there is fun in being a kid human, but because adults have known loss and hardship, there can be deeper appreciation and gratitude for the good things."_

 _Dean stares. "Were you some kind of philosopher before you got freezer burn?"_

 _He doesn't even have time to feel bad about using the pejorative; Castiel literally fucking_ lights up _with a grin and lets out a delighted laugh. "I could have been!" he chuckles, just before stealing the flower from behind Dean's ear. He holds the blooms to his nose again; there's a dusting of pollen when he moves them away. "Sometimes, you seem very sad, Dean, but if things are as you say," Cas continues quietly, re-tucking the flower behind Dean's ear, "then I believe that very, very few must have so deep a capacity for appreciation and gratitude as you. Your kindness for me when I was a stranger only deepens my faith. Thank you."_

 _Cas goes back to his flowers, and Dean kind of stands there, floored._

 _He tries to remember the last time that someone said something so honestly kind to him, and can't- even with his memory, he can't. It's barely anything, just a compliment and a simple statement of thankfulness for an act of basic human decency, and yet he feels almost overwhelmed._

 _It's a good overwhelmed, though, like something in him is full and whole for the first time after a long, long drought. It's good, and for once he doesn't question whether the feeling's real or just… an artifact, an echo of what the real thing had been._

 _Dean smiles. "Anytime, buddy," he says, and goes to sit with Cas in the flowers._


End file.
